Originally Posted by
Endus
As a mod, here's the argument usually used against political threads/forums, just for clarity's sake.
Politics is a hot topic. Especially in this day and age, when party views are becoming more and more extreme. It's not unusual to, to use a G.W.Bush example, see one side say that Bush is a traitor for passing laws that breach fundamental rights, and for the other side to say that the first side are traitors for daring to question the President. That happened all the time from 2001-2008 (and I'm not weighing in on either side nor is this the place to do so).
The issue, from a moderator's point of view, is how do we handle this? This is what news stories are covering, so we can't just label it as "trolling" and deal with it that way, even though it precisely fits pretty much every definition we use. If people get into direct personal attacks, we can label it "flaming" and take action, but there are a lot of ways to be condescending and rude that fit within existing political discourse and don't amount to a direct personal attack. And if we DO start labeling that stuff as "trolling", I absolutely guarantee that we'll be called out, likely by both sides of the debate, for censoring their side. While simultaneously thanking us for preventing the other side from trolling. And not seeing the hypocrisy.
This is why it's a difficult issue from our perspective. A lot of us LOVE political theory and debate, but a lot of what happens these days has nothing to do with theory and everything to do with yelling louder than everyone else because volume is more powerful than logic and reason. And that's what causes us to have to lock things down more often than we'd like to.